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Get Ready for a Whole ‘Street Fighter’ Live-Action Franchise

Ryu and Chun-Li in 'Street Fighter 5' key art

Street Fighter fans can rejoice—or maybe cringe in despair, depending on how you feel about previous offerings—because there’s a new live-action movie in the works, and possibly a bunch of other things, too.

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Street Fighter is becoming a movie (again)

Legendary Entertainment has acquired the film and television rights to the Street Fighter franchise, with Deadline reporting that multiple projects are underway. Though there’s rumours of a TV show in the works, so far the only official confirmation we have is that a new live-action film is currently in development.

Street Fighter doesn’t have a good track record with live-action movies. The original Street Fighter movie was a “so bad it’s good” case: It was campy and highly entertaining to watch, but not actually a good film. The second film, The Legend of Chun-Li, was just bad, and not even fun to watch while drinking with your buddies (and we did try).

While it’s hard to make a good video game adaptation, and the franchise’s history has given fans reason to be concerned, there’s a decent chance that it’ll be different this time around. Legendary Entertainment is the production company behind Detective Pikachu, which is such a great film that even people who weren’t fans of Pokémon and knew very little about the franchise watched and enjoyed it. Street Fighter can be done well in movie form; the animated films aren’t high art but they’re fun, high octane, and a little bit weird in exactly the way you want a Street Fighter product to be. Hopefully Legendary can give this new live-action movie the Detective Pikachu treatment and finally deliver the Street Fighter movie we deserve.

What’s the release window for the new Street Fighter movie?

The June 2023 release date for Street Fighter 6, combined with Capcom’s direct partnership in all Legendary Entertainment Street Fighter properties, has some speculating that the two products will be related.

What’s the plot of the live-action Street Fighter movie?

At this point, the plot, whether it’s going to be based off a specific game, and even which characters are going to make an appearance in it are all being kept under wraps. The Street Fighter games have a basic plot—a bunch of fighters from various styles and backgrounds battle each other in the street—that leaves plenty of room for narrative interpretation.

We should learn more about the plot and characters for the new Street Fighter live-action movie relatively soon.

(featured image: Capcom)

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Siobhan Ball
Siobhan Ball (she/her) is a contributing writer covering news, queer stuff, politics and Star Wars. A former historian and archivist, she made her first forays into journalism by writing a number of queer history articles c. 2016 and things spiralled from there. When she's not working she's still writing, with several novels and a book on Irish myth on the go, as well as developing her skills as a jeweller.

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